holiday gift guide: action figures!

article first published as holiday gift guide: hasbro stocking stuffers for boys on blogcritics.

this year, shopping for tate has been a snap. hasbro has three collections of action figures to choose from that can keep little boys happy for many months to come.

spider-man can take on green goblin and venom, whether by sea, with dive attack spider-man; in the sky with sky-speed spider-man; or at night with might mission spider-man. tate loves to act out adventures with good guys against the bad guys, so i appreciate the low cost of these action figures.


if robots that transform into vehicles and vice versa are more likely to interest your boy, transformers power core combiners have a new assortment of figures that connect with each other in dozens of variations to create even larger combiner robots. each figure can form the body part or weapon of a larger robot. these robots come in two- and five-packs. tate is still a little young for these but i know the day is coming when i'll be tripping over piles of robots.

it is hard for me to know who is more interested in the new star wars action figures, bill or tate. everybody's favorite figures from episodes 1-6, as well as from the clone wars series are available in this series.  although these figures are fully functioning on their own, they can also be used in a game: each figure comes with a card that lists the character's unique battle attributes. roll the die and see who wins as two figures face off in a galactic battle. tate is still too young to make use of this part of his action figure, but  look forward to adding this dimension to his play when he gets older (bill and i might just give this game a try ourselves when tate goes to bed--we used to play pokemon when the boy we babysat for went to bed.)

never has it been so easy to figure out what to buy for one of my kids.  i know for sure that tate (at least) will be happy when he opens his presents this year.  and i know he is going to be entertained for hours and hours in the coming year with toys like these.

i received a spider-man figure and an obi-wan kenobi figure to give to tate for the purpose of this review.  regardless, the thoughts and opinions expressed here are purely my own.